Shaving the Void

He shaved his beard off to save her life, and it nearly killed him. That was how the story would go, how people would remember it when they dared speak of him at all, not that many did.

Those who had known Elias Varren before that night preferred silence now, or whiskey, or prayer whispered into a pillow that smelled faintly of seawater. But memory is a stubborn thing, because it clings, even when reason cannot.

Elias had grown his beard long, unkempt, wild, shot through with silver, though he was only in his thirties. It wasn’t vanity that made him keep it, but protection.

He’d grown it after the expedition, after the night in the drowned temple under the Baltic shelf when he’d come back shivering and blood-eyed, speaking of shapes that moved in dimensions no compass could chart. He’d refused to speak of it more, except to mutter that the beard helped “keep it out.”

For years, he lived quietly, as quietly as a man can who dreams every night of rust-colored water and a single, pulsing eye in the deep. And then came Mara.

She met him at a maritime museum lecture, of all banal places, where he stood at the back like a shadow while a guest lecturer spoke of ancient seafaring myths. She noticed how he flinched when someone mentioned “sailors’ protections,” charms, amulets, and hair offerings cast to the waves.

Afterward, she introduced herself, drawn by his stillness. He was kind, but distant, like a man whose soul had been anchored somewhere far below the surface.

They fell into each other’s lives like the tide against a broken jetty, slow, relentless, and destructive in ways they could not yet see.

It began one night when she found him in front of the mirror, scissors in hand. The light was dim, humming faintly from the single bulb overhead.

“I have to,” he whispered.

She tried to stop him, thinking it some madness or trauma, but he only said, “It’s in you now. It found a way through me.”

He began to cut. Each snip was deliberate, almost ritualistic.

The beard fell in gray clumps into the sink, and with each lock, the air grew colder. A smell like brine and iron filled the room.

Mara pressed her hand to his shoulder, but his flesh was slick with sweat, hot to the touch. When the last of it was gone, when his face was bare for the first time in years, the humming stopped.

The silence that followed was worse. Then the mirror rippled.

Not cracked, but rippled, as if the glass were a thin skin stretched over something alive beneath. Elias gasped, clutching his jaw as a faint shimmer rose from his pores, like mist, but darker, heavier.

It slid down his neck and pooled into the sink, gathering itself into a shape that should not have existed. Something eel-like, eyeless, its skin shifting with impossible depth.

Mara screamed.

Elias tried to grab it, but his hands passed through as if through smoke. The thing coiled once, twice, and then darted toward her.

It entered her through her open mouth.

She collapsed, her body convulsing as her pupils widened to black orbs that swallowed all light. Elias fell beside her, trembling, his clean-shaven chin streaked with salt tears.

And then he heard it. A whisper, not from Mara’s lips, but from within her, layered and many-throated, murmuring in a language he had not heard since that night in the temple.

He understood none of it, yet each syllable was clear to him.

The beard had been a seal, a ward of flesh. He had been its prison, carrying a fragment of the abyss with him, locked away by his own will and the living fibers that grew from his skin.

By cutting it away, he’d set it free, and it had found a new host. He begged her to speak, to come back.

But Mara’s eyes were voids now, and when she looked at him, he saw the deep ocean in them.

“Thank you,” she said in a voice not her own. “We were waiting.”

The walls began to pulse. Not metaphorically, pulse, as if the plaster were breathing.

The air thickened; the ceiling bulged outward, pregnant with something vast. A low sound filled the house like a foghorn underwater.

Elias screamed, but his voice was gone. His skin began to flake, not like ash, but like peeling paint, revealing beneath it the same slick blackness that had entered Mara.

He clawed at his face, wishing for the beard again, for the prison, for anything to contain the horror leaking from his veins. But it was too late. The thing inside him wanted out, and now it had found a way.

Neighbors entered the house days later after reports of a stench. Inside, the mirrors were all shattered.

There was no sign of Mara, and Elias was in the bathtub, every hair follicle sealed shut, his face smooth and blank as glass.

His eyes were open, and in their depths, if one dared look closely, something moved. Something that was watching back.

Some say she still walks near the coast when the fog rolls in, barefoot, whispering to the waves. Others claim to have seen a man’s reflection following her, even when she walks alone.

They say he shaved his beard off to save her life, and it nearly killed him, but the truth is worse. It did.

And she’s still not done with the sea.